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public health
What I Saw in Cuba? Resilience
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
Mar 28, 2026
I traveled to Cuba this month. As a Cuban American, that sentence carries the weight of longing born of an estrangement from my roots. For much of my life, Cuba existed as a distant story, a place I knew only through descriptions from my father.
I was there as part of an international solidarity convoy; over 500 representatives from more than 30 countries, united by a simple conviction: No country has the right to strangle another simply because it chose a different path. I cannot stand by while the island of my family’s heritage is suffocated.
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
A Public Health System Under Siege
One of the most profound visits was to a neighborhood polyclinic in Havana. These clinics are the backbone of Cuba’s public health system. Doctors live on the second floor, above where they work. They know every patient in their community by name. They treat physical and psychological health alike, and they embody a model of care that prioritizes people over profit.
I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
But the doctors I met face heartbreaking constraints. They are highly trained professionals who know exactly what their patients need, and they know those treatments exist. Due to the US embargo, they cannot access them. Imagine living every day with the skill to heal and being blocked by a political and economic siege.
We brought what we could: 6,300 pounds of medical supplies delivered by our delegation, including neonatal equipment, analgesics, catheters, and other critical materials, valued at $433,000 and more still in unquantifiable amounts stuffed into carry-on and personal bags, sacrificing space for our own clothing and toiletries. Cuban doctors told us about nights when the power goes out, and medical students rush to respirators, manually pumping air for hours until electricity is restored. They save lives with their bare hands.
Community and Creativity in the Face of Scarcity
Everywhere we went, I saw people organizing to survive. In a central Havana neighborhood, we helped refurbish a crumbling playground. We brought paint and new swings. A local man who maintains the park offered to take the swings down each night so they wouldn’t be taken, then put them back up each morning for the children. That kind of mutual care was everywhere.
We met an artist named Lázaro, who collects garbage and old newspapers to create recycled art. He teaches neighborhood kids to do the same. His studio walls are covered in vibrant works that double as expressions of resistance and creativity.
On another day, we set up a table outside Lázaro’s studio with construction paper, markers, and glue. Children from the neighborhood gathered to write letters to pen pals in Singapore. I translated letters from English to Spanish, helping each child respond in Spanish and illustrate their replies. Parents played drums and danced while the kids painted and wrote. It was a profound moment of cross-border connection—kids building relationships through art and translation, across continents, across the blockade.
For Cuban Americans, there is something like a spiritual cost that is paid for quietly going along with the status quo in the face of the many injustices we have grown up with for decades, which seem to us to have intensified in these recent years. But the children I saw in Havana had their spirit intact.
The Human Cost of the Embargo
The blockade is not an abstraction. Poverty is real. I gave what I could, but as individuals, we cannot meet that scale of need brought upon by a systemic crisis created by US policy.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work.
Rolling blackouts on the island are the result of a strategy of siege warfare intensified in January. Cuba has gone months without fuel imports due to sanctions and naval pressure aimed at stopping oil shipments to the island. Power plants cannot run consistently. Hospitals cannot perform necessary surgeries. Water pumping infrastructure fails. This is not a natural disaster. It is man-made violence; it is a silent war.
And yet, the Cuban people do not wait for rescue. They organize. They adapt. They invent.
Solidarity and a Call to Action
As a Cuban American, I have heard all my life that Cuba is a country ruled by capricious autocrats. That the Cuban people are waiting to be liberated. That their strangulation is meant to help them. But standing on that island, talking to doctors and artists and children and families, I saw something else entirely. I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
Cuba is open to dialogue and investment with respect for its sovereignty. But the US continues to enforce a policy that even much of the world condemns. Year after year, the United Nations General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to end the embargo. Year after year, the US ignores it.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work. But solidarity cannot end after a single delegation. We need to break the siege. We need to end this decades-long economic warfare.
Cubans have a right to self-governance. They have a right to medicine, to electricity, to water, to dignity. My father chose to leave Cuba in the face of poverty brought on by a cruel sanctions regime. I chose to return for the same reason.
Let Cuba live.
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'Game Over Zeldin': 160+ Climate and Health Groups Say EPA Chief Must Go
"The wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated."
Mar 24, 2026
A month after President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what they celebrated as the "single largest deregulatory action in US history," a coalition of over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups came together Tuesday to call for the EPA chief's ouster.
Zeldin was confirmed by Senate Republicans and a trio of Democrats just over a week after Trump returned to power in January 2025. The "Game Over Zeldin" coalition, led by the Climate Action Campaign (CAC) and Moms Clean Air Force, argued in an open letter that no other EPA administrator "in history—Democratic or Republican—has so brazenly betrayed the agency's core mission" to "protect human health and the environment."
"Zeldin has dismantled protections that keep our kids, families, and climate safe, and our air and water clean," the letter notes. "He slashed vital funding, gutted agency staff, and has rigged the system to put corporate polluters first, at the expense of our health. Zeldin's EPA has rejected science and health data—and is refusing to count the value of human lives and health—in order to erode commonsense public health safeguards. He has decimated environmental justice programs and hard-fought progress—entirely eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights."
Dominique Browning, director and co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force, pointed out in a Tuesday statement that "in just the past few months, he has supported the Trump administration in using taxpayer money to prop up the coal industry; he has made it easier for polluters to spew mercury—a potent neurotoxin that damages the developing brains of babies—into our air and waterways; and he has rolled back the endangerment finding in an attempt to sabotage EPA's ability to cut climate pollution."
The 2009 endangerment finding underpins all federal climate policy. David Arkush of the watchdog Public Citizen—which is also part of the diverse coalition behind the new letter—warned at the time that if allowed to stand, the repeal "will hamstring the government's ability to combat the most terrible environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come."
Young Americans and a coalition of environmental and public health organizations swiftly filed a pair of lawsuits over the rollback. Another group of 24 states, joined by various US cities and counties, sued last week. The most recent filing is expected to be consolidated with the first coalition's case, according to The New York Times, "making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration's unraveling of federal climate policy."
The new letter stresses the consequences of that unraveling, stating that "because of Zeldin's directives, we will suffer more health-damaging air pollution and be exposed to more toxic chemicals in our homes, in our food, in our products, and in our water. Zeldin's rollbacks will lead to more carbon dioxide and methane pollution that will contribute to worsening climate disasters."
"Families across the country, whether rural or urban, are already struggling with the consequences of Zeldin's actions," the letter adds. "The damage he is doing will span generations. Zeldin is deepening environmental injustices and will leave a terrible legacy for our children and grandchildren."
We refuse to stay silent while Lee Zeldin treats our lives like a line item to be deleted. The EPA is for the people, not polluters. His time is up; Lee Zeldin must go. #GameOverZeldin www.gameoverzeldin.com
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— Physicians for Social Responsibility - National (@psr.org) March 24, 2026 at 12:12 PM
CAC director Margie Alt declared Tuesday that "the wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated. We will be paying the price for decades to come."
"Zeldin ignored science as well as the legal and moral precedent," she said. "Instead, he looked at the numbers and made a choice: He decided that corporate bottom lines matter more than our lives. He decided you and your family are expendable. After a year on the job, it is clear that Zeldin is either unable or unwilling to uphold his oath of office or the EPA's fundamental mission. So let us be clear: Our lives are not expendable. Our health is not expendable. Our climate is not expendable. Lee Zeldin must go."
Other organizations that signed on to the letter include Beyond Plastics, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, Clean Air Council, Clean Water Action, Climate Hawks Vote, Earthjustice, Environmental Working Group, Environmental Protection Network, GreenLatinos, Indivisible Action Coalition, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and more.
"Administrator Zeldin's established pattern of placing polluter profits above the health and safety of people across the country cannot stand," said UCS president and CEO Gretchen Goldman. "The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions is undeniable. The unprecedented, climate-fueled heatwave a large swath of the United States has been experiencing is only the latest example."
"The public deserves an EPA administrator who will face the challenge of the climate crisis and fossil fuel and toxics pollution head on with proven policy solutions," she argued, "not actively serve as an agent of destruction beholden to the whims of oil, gas, and chemical industry executives and an authoritarian, anti-science US president."
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The MAHA Deception: What RFK Jr., Trump, and Company Are Really Doing to Our Food
People’s understandable distrust and discontent are being manipulated in service of a villainous power grab by some of the very same players that MAHA performs opposition to.
Mar 23, 2026
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kid Rock, and Mike Tyson are on the stage of American slopaganda telling us that “for the first time in our nation’s history, the federal government put REAL FOOD at the center of the American diet.” “Something” is finally being done about ultra-processed foods, harmful additives, environmental toxins, and corporate capture of the regulatory system to “Make America Healthy Again.”
I’ve spent much of my life in food justice movements that are fighting to address these very same problems. I’ve taught and written about the toxicity and corporate control of the food system (and was actually featured in a documentary alongside RFK Jr., who strangely had no connection with the grassroots Hawai‘i movement that the film was about). Of all the vile corporations and politicians I’ve studied and gone head-to-head with, the forces congealing at the top of MAHA are far and away the most spectacular threat I’ve ever seen to a healthier food system (and just about everything else).
Alongside shirtless RFK workouts, the MAHA performance opened with purported “wins” around synthetic dyes and whole foods. In reality, RFK did not ban artificial food dyes, but asked large companies to “voluntarily phase them out” (food companies have a long history of doing absolutely nothing “voluntarily”). And in reality, though whole foods are emphasized in new dietary guidelines, federal programs like school meals are having their budgets for whole foods sliced out.
Far more significantly, these exaggerated, largely symbolic gestures are masking a whole slew of far-reaching poisonous actions that are of grave danger to our health, and radically bolster the power of Big Ag, Big Chem, and all Big Capitalists (yes, including Big Pharma). It’s not just that rhetoric and actions don’t match. It’s that people’s understandable distrust and discontent are being manipulated in service of a villainous power grab by some of the very same players that MAHA performs opposition to.
The evil genius of MAHA elites has been the appropriation of elements of progressive movements that have struggled for decades to illuminate corporate control of the food system and forge a healthier and fairer food system for all. We cannot give our wicked Doppelgänger this win.
Part of the MAHA song and dance is to hyper-emphasize individual choice and responsibility for health, often in intensely patronizing, shaming, and classist ways. Telling people they can avoid chemicals and disease all via individual choices has provided a profitable opportunity for MAHA influencers to peddle their products.
But it’s a cruel illusion that consumers can avoid toxins they don’t even know are in their food (much less invisible in the wider environment), eat food that isn’t available, spend dollars they don’t have, and avoid corporate monopolies that are entirely ubiquitous in the food system. Of course individuals have some amount of agency, but the rules of the system are stacked. And it’s the very people that the rules are stacked in favor of who are working hardest to distract us from seeing those rules.
Here are just some of the food system “rules” that the Trump-MAHA-RFK regime is solidifying as they smoke and mirror us with illusions of “choice”:
- One of the primary, open goals of this regime is to destroy regulation. Extreme deregulation of the past decades is the reason we have massive corporate consolidation in the food system; the reason over half of American farmland is blanketed in ecologically destructive herbicide-GMO monocrops; the reason overproduction of these crops forms the basis of our highly-processed food system; the reason children are being manipulated via advertising to get hooked early on foods that sentence them to a life of chronic disease; the reason food is packed full of unpronounceable toxic additives; the reason a concentrated grocery sector has left sweeping food deserts across the country; the reason hunger rates are so high in spite of there being an abundance of food; and the reason workers all along the food chain are living on poverty wages while they labor in horrifically dangerous conditions. The MAHA-Trump-RFK regime is bringing us to a new apex in a deregulated food system. The regime has already reduced oversight of factory farms, increased factory farm slaughter speeds (175 chickens per minute), demolished food safety regulations, removed pesticide use reporting, gutted the agencies and workforce tasked with regulating Big Ag, and all while slanting an already monopolized market further toward Big Ag via subsidies (and forms of government intervention that big business does like).
- Farm bill policy and subsidies largely dictate what gets grown in the United States and what ends up on our plates. MAHA rhetoric pushes individual responsibility for “healthy,” “wholesome,” and “fresh” eating, while the Trump-MAHA regime is making those very choices impossible for people by systematically deepening an ultra-processed food system. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in 2025 was to terminate $1 billion in funding for programs that helped schools and food banks buy fresh, local food from farmers, while increasing subsidies by many billions to the largest 5% of mega corn and soy monocrops. It’s not about the farmers getting rich—these subsidies directly bolster the profits of corporate agribusiness, such as food manufacturers who buy commodity crops far below production cost to make the ultra-processed foods we are instructed not to eat in the new Dietary Guidelines.
- These subsidies also go straight to the pockets of factory farms in the form of extraordinarily underpriced herbicide-resistant (GMO) corn and soy animal feed. MAHA influencers champion grass-fed, pasture-raised beef and dairy, but the Trump/MAHA regime has eliminated billions in funding for programs that supported regenerative grazing and fired more than a thousand Natural Resources Conservation Service staff that helped farmers transition to regenerative agriculture. An estimated 99% of animals used for food in the United States are raised on factory farms that are driving antibiotic-resistant infections, zoonotic diseases, foodborne illness, and massive water and air pollution (which together kill hundreds of thousands of people annually).
- As the Trump-MAHA regime pours lavish sums of public money into the bloated coffers of private agribusiness, it has made the biggest cuts in history to food assistance for poor people. Already, 20% of children in the United States were experiencing food insecurity amid skyrocketing food prices. Over the next decade 22.3 million families will loose support they rely upon to eat, credit of the Make American Healthy Again regime.
- MAHA’s rhetoric around dismantling the corporate stranglehold on government likely carries its greatest mass appeal; it is also the most significant inversion to reality. The regime has radically increased the power of big money over politics, and corporations are spending at historic, record-breaking levels to grab all that they can. Today’s most influential and highest-earning lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, transferred directly from the Trump campaign and is now representing the American Chemistry Council, Bayer-Monsanto, and multiple Big Ag (and Big Pharma) companies.
- The policy-change prizes being handed out to the highest corporate bidders in the food system are even more extreme than classic deregulation and corporate welfare subsidies. The draft new Farm Bill would actually shield pesticide companies Monsanto-Bayer, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta, and BASF from liability for deadly health impacts of their products that they have knowingly covered up for decades.
- Trump is also gifting special legal impunity to Bayer-Monsanto, makers of glyphosate (Roundup), as it faces over 177,000 lawsuits alleging that glyphosate causes cancer. Under the RFK-endorsed Trump+Monsanto executive order, domestic production of glyphosate will also ramp up, meaning more glyphosate in our food, water, soil, air, and bodies, especially those of farmworkers.
- While glyphosate has received the most surprise from MAHA moms, it is far from the only dangerous pesticide being shoved down the public’s wary throats. The regime has green-lit new PFAS pesticides, "forever chemicals" that never break down in the environment and are linked to thyroid tumors, liver damage, and reproductive harm. They have also gone around the courts and reapproved the twice-banned pesticide dicamba, linked to pancreatic and colon cancers. Dicamba (also made primarily by Bayer-Monsanto) can vaporize and move through the air for several days after application and is causing unprecedented damage to small farms and communities surrounding genetically engineered dicamba-resistant soy and cotton monocultures.
- Meanwhile, the new Farm Bill is attempting to eradicate state and local laws that currently protect people from pesticides, and preempt new ones from being passed. In sum, the Trump-MAHA regime is approving new forever pesticides, increasing pesticide production, wiping away laws that protect people from pesticides, and then blocking people’s ability to sue over the harms. It’s hard to see this as anything but rule by and for Monsanto-Bayer and friends.
- Poisons will also increase at other levels of the food chain. The MAHA regime is rolling back the Toxic Substances Control Act, shifting toward “chemical industry science,” reduced transparency, and severely weakened risk evaluations. They are going to court to defend the continued use of phthalates, extremely toxic “everywhere chemicals” added to things like food packaging that have been found in nearly all tested food and are known to cause reproductive issues, genital abnormalities, neurodevelopmental disorders, respiratory issues, diabetes, and heart disease. Across the board, the regime is gutting the already insufficient laws we had for regulating poisons.
- In order to push forward with this poisons-everywhere agenda, the Trump-MAHA regime is disassembling the science that has been revealing the links between chemicals and human health, slashing research funding, and sabotaging knowledge production (and thus the regulation that follows scientific discovery) on everything from microplastics to PFAS to the synergistic effects of pesticides. Federal workers who investigated toxic substances and pollutants have also been fired en masse. Toxic corporate totalitarianism relies on the destruction of truth (including the manipulation and weaponization of science, with haunting parallels to other authoritarian regimes).
- One type of “regulation” that a fascist-aspiring oligarchical regime actually relies upon is the type that distracts from the criminals at the top by demonizing and policing the people at the bottom. The people growing our food, who already faced intense exploitation and marginalization, are being especially scapegoated—abducted, detained, deported, separated from their families, “hunted like animals.”
The list could go on. And the full picture on the MAHA regime and health is even more sickening—unprecedented cuts to healthcare; massive increases in air, water, mercury, and PFAS pollution; dismantled gun violence prevention laws (guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the US); billions in handouts to big pharma; destroyed public health institutions; hastened apocalyptic climate breakdown… The aims and repercussions of the MAHA deception extend far beyond any particular policy or issue—it is a project that ultimately serves authoritarian oligarchical rule.
There’s a tendency among some progressives and leftists to simply dismiss anything that touches the MAHA matrix as innately conspiratorial, unscientific, and reactionary—at times even inadvertently positioning themselves on the side of Big Ag so as to seem in opposition to MAHA and Trump (an all around win-win for Big Ag). While the power at the top of MAHA is deeply reactionary and using conspiracy to pull ordinary people further right, the evil genius of MAHA elites has been the appropriation of elements of progressive movements that have struggled for decades to illuminate corporate control of the food system and forge a healthier and fairer food system for all. We cannot give our wicked Doppelgänger this win. Instead of abandoning everything RFK Jr. touches, we need to spin it back at them with the missing elements of truth and justice.
Truth: We have a food system designed around maximization of profit at every level, intensified by decades of bipartisan policy that has unleashed corporate power to the severe detriment of health, safety, workers, local economies, the Earth, the 99.9%. The biggest conspiracy is plain before our eyes: a system doing exactly what it is supposed to do, capitalism (which yes, the overlords of do all sorts of perverse things to preserve and extend). Justice demands getting to the roots of that system and challenging the 0.1% who are benefiting from it—many of whom happen to be puppet-mastering MAHA.
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